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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26854669">melody, counterpoint, and the song of silence</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/categranger/pseuds/categranger'>categranger</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>4'33" - John Cage (Song)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Aliens, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 17:08:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,713</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26854669</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/categranger/pseuds/categranger</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When an elderly violinist, a young Cage fan, and an alien music lover meet at a performance of John Cage's 4'33", nothing will ever be quite the same again.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>New Year's Resolutions 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>melody, counterpoint, and the song of silence</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/gifts">Gammarad</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Ekaterina Shafranskaya is eighty-five years old, and lives on a fixed income. She has two great indulgences in life: cold grapes, and classical music. </p><p>The music she learned from her father, a bear of a man who drank too much to ward off the Siberian chill and became jolly with it, bellowing opera tunes and scraping at the violin he played with more love than skill. By the time Ekaterina was eight, she could play better than he could, and his pride was immense and his joy unfeigned. When she fell in love and defected during an international concert tour, her greatest sorrow was that she might never see him again. (Yet decades later, when Ekaterina took the first flight she could into Krasnoyarsk, Pyotr was waiting for her by the fireside, his old violin on his lap. She knelt by his chair, the violin caught in the middle of their embrace, and was the small child again, transported by the nostalgic smell of his pipe.) Though she rarely plays her father’s violin now, she still can; someday she will pass it to her granddaughter Zoya, and hope it can live on.</p><p>The grapes she buys at her local farmers’ market, and if she sometimes suspects that kindly Mrs. Herrera is undercharging her and giving her rather more sales than she gives other people, Ekaterina doesn’t mind. There are some advantages to growing old.</p><p>Like lower prices on tickets at the concert hall two blocks over. You don’t always get a senior discount, but sometimes you do. And occasionally nice Mr. Nguyen at the box office sets aside a rush ticket for her, since Ekaterina doesn’t like crowding up with all the frenetic young people who compete for them, as squawky as parrots and as brightly-plumaged. She isn’t jealous of the young – she has been young in her time, and she doesn’t grudge them their energy or their quirks – but they are tiring. Ekaterina stands to the side, and studies the posters on the wall, and waits until the student set has swaggered and sauntered away, and Mr. Nguyen beckons to her.</p><p>“A rare treat, Mrs. Shafranskaya,” he says, holding out a program. “A rare treat. Tonight is all about the contrast – Schumann to begin, and after intermission Cage. Hard to imagine two composers more different!”</p><p>“Hard to imagine,” Ekaterina says, dryly, and looks at the program. She has never been fond of twentieth-century composers. So much noise and so little melody, and most of it seeming more than a bit like some masturbatory fetish for numbers and upending all convention for sheer effrontery’s sake. Ekaterina likes music to sound like music, not cacophony.</p><p>But the pianist has programmed Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, and the Arabeske, and she particularly loves both pieces. Other favorites follow. And there at the bottom of the page, right before intermission, is Träumerei, and her vision blurs for a second. She remembers playing it on Pyotr’s violin, the last time she ever set foot in Krasnoyarsk. She can almost hear the raindrops falling on the umbrella her husband Antonio held over her head, smell the cut grass under her feet, hear her sister’s soft weeping. </p><p>“I’ll take it,” she says, and opens her coin purse for the ten-dollar bill she keeps folded neatly there, waiting for the right concert to spend it on.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>Ximena Carbajal Morales is twenty years old, and lives at home while she studies pre-law by day and works the late shift at the grocery store. Six to midnight, six days a week, you come by, and you’ll find Ximena scanning ramen and Marlboros and tortilla chips, and waiting patiently for Mr. Tremaine to laboriously count seventy-six cents from the fistful of change he pulls out of his pocket (but of course he would rather use nickels and pennies than quarters, so it might take a while). It’s a life.</p><p>Ximena loves three things above all else: law, dyeing her hair shades not found in nature, and twentieth-century experimental music. Her father shakes his head every time she changes her hair, and shouts from the next room for her to turn that <i>basura</i> off whenever she plays <i>Pierrot Lunaire</i> on her phone without headphones. But he brags about his lawyer daughter to his football buddies when they come over to drink beer and yell curses at whoever’s playing quarterback for the Giants these days, and he buys her a ticket to <i>Wozzeck</i> for Christmas. </p><p>Ximena might be about to add a fourth thing to her list. Her relationship with Jayden is new, but the way Jayden squeezes her hand in silent laughter when Dr. Blair says something ridiculous about the Constitution is just too addictive. Little has ever deflected Ximena from her single-minded pursuit of becoming the youngest woman and first legally blind person to argue a case before the Supreme Court, but feeling Jayden’s hand in hers, Jayden’s ankle knocking against her own, the two of them pressed together from shoulder to toes, and yet as chaste as two nuns – well. She’s still going to get an A in Dr. Blair’s class, but only because she studies like hell when Jayden is safely somewhere else.</p><p>And one night a week – well, one night a week is all hers. The one night she isn’t plastering a fake retail-smile on her face, cheerfully going out of her mind with boredom in order to pay her bills and keep her student loans down, her customers a blur of indistinct faces and repeated conversations. Some nights she flops on her bed and reads famous dissents from history. Some nights she curls up with Jayden in a library carrel built for one. Some nights she takes one of her father’s beers and lets him tell her about football and why wide receivers should never be drafted above the fourth round.</p><p>Some nights Ximena hears about a John Cage concert, and fights back the music majors who try to cut her in line at the box office, and scores a $10 rush ticket. There’s some Schumann she’ll have to tolerate first, trite over-romantic stuff, but she’ll put up with it for Cage. She admires his daring, his willingness to break the rules, his creativity and his cleverness. Coloring inside the lines is overrated. You can have the melody, Ximena thinks, if you’ll leave her the dissonant counterpoint.</p><p>(Jayden is a philistine who readily confesses that her favorite composer is John Williams.)</p><p>Ximena settles into her seat. The stage is a wash of brown, but she can just about distinguish the shape of a piano. That’s all she needs, she’s not picky. Whoever’s playing tonight isn’t important, she doesn’t give a donkey’s ass what race or gender or age they are. It’s the music that counts, and for that all you need is ears.<br/>
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>Subaru Yellowstone is fifty-nine Earth years old, and is currently having an adolescent temper tantrum, manifested to wit: she has chosen a local name from the prettiest sounds Earth has to offer, and has chosen to be a she. </p><p>This has caused some consternation in her birth cluster. The cluster had only meant to take a short detour through this part of the galaxy, shaving a few terrecks off the time of their journey to display their new flowerbud to their spawning ground. There had been a squabble over something to do with the flowerbud – the cluster had been new to budding, and had reckoned without the bud’s tendency to overset all comfortable habitual arrangements. In any event, the cluster had not been paying close enough attention to their route, knowing it to travel through a benighted backwards area without spacefarers, and had got their vessel holed by an unlucky piece of space debris from a planet hurling things into space with more indiscriminate zeal than purpose.</p><p>Fifty-nine Earth years later, the member of the cluster that Subaru calls Tacotuesday has been unable to get the vessel spacefaring again, though ze says that ze will crack it any day, and the bud (who became the being now known as Subaru) is still as perplexing to her cluster as ever. Perhaps it was inevitable, given her nurture on this primitive planet, that she should be fascinated, no, enamored of the natives. They are an odd-looking bunch, with odder preoccupations – who even came <i>up</i> with the idea of gender, and why do they live in such tiny clusters in such large dwellings, and what is their fascination with the drug sugar? -  and what they call art makes the mature members of the cluster shudder. </p><p>Subaru, being the one immature member of the cluster, sticks four middle tentacles at Tacotuesday, Bronx, and Eleven Ferriswheel, and slithers off to indulge in the intoxicant known as Music.</p><p>It’s not <i>Subaru’s</i> fault that she lives on Earth. Eventually Tacotuesday will get the vessel working again, and they’ll all be off to the spawning ground. This will only be the tiniest blip in Subaru’s life, which will be much longer than the limited lifespan of these mayfly natives. She will no longer be able to consume deep dish pizza, and frighten drunks in the subways into swearing off the booze, and use her power of invisibility to go places that have big Keep Out signs on them, and rock out to the power of Freddie Mercury. </p><p>(Perhaps forgoing deep dish pizza will not be an entirely bad thing. It tastes like teenage rebellion, but it does strange things to Subaru’s insides and her slime is orange-colored for at <i>least</i> two parlings. Of all the exotic Earth food, only brussels sprouts and orange Jello leave her insides their natural sunny cerulean.)</p><p>Now Subaru sidles her way along the wall of the box office lobby, past a busy Mr. Nguyen, past an abstracted Ms. Shafranskaya, and past a peacock-haired Ximena. (Subaru approves of natives who change their plumage. What they call hair is by far the boringest part of most natives.) She vaults up into the rafters, picking her way past lights and wires, invisibly crawling across the ceiling until she’s immediately above the piano, hanging easily from a beam.</p><p>Best seat in the house.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>Subaru thinks the concert is announced as a Human Cage program, which sounds extremely interesting, but it turns out to be a Shoeman Cage program, which is another thing entirely. She watches the pianist with single-minded focus; she is not entirely sure which gender the being has elected to be, but zir fingers move with lightning speed and the sounds they coax out of the instrument are beautiful. Of all the inventions of the natives, Subaru thinks music is the most worthy of memory. Perhaps when she starts a bud, she will name it Music. That will scandalize the cluster for sure.</p><p>Intermission is boring, but Subaru native-watches. Everyone moves around and buys cold sustenance to put in their mouths and goes to empty their insides. She waits impatiently for the music to come back.</p><p>Finally. The lights dim. The natives return to their seats. The pianist makes zir sedate way out to the piano, raises the lid, and sits on the bench.</p><p>Subaru waits for the first note.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>The Schumann wasn’t too bad, Ximena admits grudgingly, if only to herself. If you liked that kind of atmospheric <i>melodic</i> stuff. You could do worse. <i>Opera</i>, for example. </p><p>She stays in her seat at intermission. She’s watching her budget, and she doesn’t need overpriced ice cream to enjoy a concert. Cage is up next. 4’33” to start the second half off with a bang, and then all the good stuff she’s come to listen to. She can hardly wait.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>Ekaterina visits the ladies’ room at intermission, then returns to her seat and wraps her shawl more closely around her. It’s always chilly in concert halls, always chilly everywhere really. </p><p>The Schumann was beautiful. She’s still thrumming from the Träumerei, played with aching wistfulness by a pianist with a tailored suit and a sense of the sublime. The memory of that Träumerei will carry her through this week, whatever little aches, pains, or indignities old age brings her. You can eat beauty, she thinks, live on melody.</p><p>Now it’s time for Cage, and that gimmick of a piece. But Ekaterina is in charity with the world at present, and she keeps her seat. She’s paid for the whole concert, and she intends to get her money’s worth. Whether she’ll be impressed or not, that’s a different matter, but at least she’ll get something to talk about out of it. She’s not sure Mrs. Wright across the street has even heard of Cage’s 4’33”. Something to tell her about at book club.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>Ze is broken.</p><p>Ze looked fine before the concert went to intermission. Zir fingers flew, zir music soared to the rafters that Subaru is currently twined around. Ze showed no signs of being broken.</p><p>(But then, Subaru is not good at diagnosing signs of brokenness in the natives. If someone in her cluster is broken, they will be flashing neon purple HELP HELP HELP telepathic waves, and it will be very obvious. Natives tend to do things like ooze red matter, or fall down (but they fall down a lot without being broken), or clutch at their middle (but they do this after consuming an inadvisable amount of foodstuffs as well). Subaru has mostly given up trying.)</p><p>After sixty seconds, Subaru untwines part of her body from the rafter and leans down a bit to get a closer view. It’s safe, she’s using her invisibility. If she just gets a little closer, maybe she can see why ze is just <i>sitting</i> there, zir fingers resting on the keys, and making <i>no noise</i>. Humans are not designed to make no noise. It’s a strange and uncanny thing to witness.</p><p>There’s a light just below her. It’s trained on the pianist. She crosses into it as she swings down closer to the pianist. Maybe it will help her see better…</p><p>Someone screams.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>Gimmick or not, Ekaterina is secretly enjoying 4’33”. It’s restful, the silence. After a few seconds, she closes her eyes, the better to experience it. </p><p>Around her, she can feel the weight of the crowd. A crowd of breathing souls, under one vaulted roof, together in one shared experience, listening to their own silence. A crowd this size would normally be a cacophony of overlapping conversations, every person and their neighbor shouting the daily minutiae of their lives at each other in an attempt to be heard over the general din. Yap yap yap, that’s all the youth of today do.</p><p>Ekaterina keeps her eyes shut, and listens.</p><p>Listens to the raindrops on the roof, and the melody of the traffic outside. Listens to someone cough down near the front, the desperate half-cough of someone whose eyes are watering with the effort of not coughing. Listens to someone shifting in their seat, the creak of a floorboard as an usher paces in an alcove, the whisper of someone transgressing a social norm. </p><p>Someone screams.</p><p>Ekaterina frowns. Her eyes are still shut. The youth of today, no doubt. One of those hoydens from out front, dared to make a disturbance. They should be ashamed of themselves. Cage isn’t exactly what Ekaterina would call music, but there is a restfulness to this ‘piece’ of his, to listening to the sound in the room and letting it carry her wherever it wills.</p><p>The scream stopped as suddenly as it began. The silence descends again.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>Ximena isn’t watching the stage when the scream happens. </p><p>She’s staring vaguely somewhere in the middle distance, safely above people’s heads. Since she was a small child, she’s mastered the ability to stare into space without making people feel like she’s staring at them. It’s been a matter of vital self-defense.</p><p>4’33” isn’t her favorite of Cage’s works. Too…obvious. Not creative enough.</p><p>But as she listens to the silence around her, she drifts in the weight of it. The horns outside, now that is lovely. She could build a matrix out of those horns, unpredictable and sharp, punctuate it with oaths shouted out open windows (unheard inside the concert hall, but vivid in her imagination). The rev of a car – the snatch of a bass beat from a radio turned too high – the raindrops falling and the wipers squeaking –</p><p>Someone screams.</p><p>Ximena jerks. She could have sworn that in the moment before the scream, she had seen movement in mid-air, just above the piano.</p><p>But surely that’s impossible. Things do not suddenly start flying around in mid-air, in the middle of Cage’s 4’33”. He was not that ingenious.</p><p>Ximena tries hard to see what is happening, but it’s useless. </p><p>It’s eerily silent in the concert hall.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p><i>Shit</i>, Subaru says, having found that the natives’ capacity for profanity is their greatest musical invention. <i>Shit shit shit bugger shit.</i></p><p><i>Amber</i> light. Now that she’s been an idiot and wandered straight down into it, she’s calling herself all sorts of names for not noticing it before. Looks like amber plus blue, which makes a nice warm white spotlight - which would be lovely, except that the humans don’t fucking know that amber is the emergency color of the galaxy, do they now? And when a Trixallian wearing an invisibility filter wanders into a fucking amber light, the invisibility filter goes OFF (so peacekeepers from non-empathic species can use their amber beacons to perceive anyone attempting to flee a crime scene) and -- HELLO HUMANS I AM HERE TO EAT YOUR CHILDREN.</p><p>(Subaru doesn’t eat children. They would do horrible things to her slime, she’s sure.)</p><p>She cuts off the scream with one instinctive mental nudge, and nearly as quickly prevents any more by a slightly larger, more general nudge. No more noise from this lot, not while she thinks about what to do next.</p><p>The pianist is staring up at her, zir mouth frozen on a silent scream, zir body frozen in place. Subaru frowns. She liked that pianist. And now ze will probably not finish the program. Sad.</p><p>She looks out at the audience. More frozen. Everyone staring at her, the imposter in the rafters. </p><p>Subaru’s bottom lips begin to tremble, just a bit. She’s been raised on Earth, loves Earthling things, and yet Earthlings flip the <i>fuck</i> out, every time they see her. She forgets sometimes just how primitive they are, just how focused they are on their primal urges of mate-eat-sleep, and how little they comprehend of their universe. </p><p>And yet – they are able to hear the music.</p><p>Anyone can hear the music of the universe, if they listen hard enough. It comes through in trickles, snatches of melody and echoes of a beat. Some beings are gifted and hear more; Subaru is not a huge fan of the kind of music the natives call “opera,” but she heard a lecture at one concert about a native called Rossini who said the music just came to him, and all he had to do was write it down, pages and pages and pages a day, as fast as his pen could scribble. </p><p>As young as the natives are, as silly and as insular, if they can hear the music they have a future. When they grow up. When they see Subaru and smile instead of scream, and reach out one of their funny fingered hands to make ritual greeting with one of her tentacles.</p><p>Not these particular natives, of course. These natives have seen her, and must have recognized the fact of What she is, and the biological imperative of her race is irresistible. She has pushed back the moment as long as she can, meeting their eyes, letting them look their fill at her, since they will have to pay for it. She would refuse it if she could; Eleven Ferriswheel says there is a race a few trisystems over that can memory wipe, and Subaru wouldn’t mind knowing <i>that</i> particular trick. She’d wipe the last 150 seconds and leave everyone in the hall with a vague impression that 4’33” was a boring piece of music.</p><p>As it is, though, Subaru doesn’t have that skill. She thinks “Sorry” at them, and lets her mind do what it wants to, an instinctive protective firewall.</p><p>The natives in the hall – and the pianist, of course, <i>damn it</i> - wink out. There are suddenly a great deal more stray cats running around the streets outside. </p><p>(“Cats,” Eleven Ferriswheel had decided, when they were updating everyone’s programming for their temporary stopping point. “They venerate cats on this planet, odd things that they are. No doubt in previous centuries they ruled humans. Cats are self-sufficient and humans do not generally mistreat them. Cats have the best chance of living a good life on their own, if we are forced to translate them.”)</p><p>After a moment, Subaru shrugs off her gloominess. It was a mistake, an accident. It cost her most of the Cage part of the concert, which she regrets, and though the pianist makes a beautiful tuxedoed cat, she does wish ze had been able to stay human. Ze probably preferred to be human, if ze could make music like that. Although being a cat is much less complicated. </p><p>She looks out at the empty concert hall.</p><p>But it is not empty. Far apart in the denuded rows, two lone figures sit. </p><p>Swearing under her breath, Subaru swings upwards, out of the traitorous amber light.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p><i>Something</i> happened. </p><p>Ximena can’t see details worth shit, but she saw the moment everyone in the hall just … stopped. They froze in place, no one moving a muscle, the enforced stillness horrible to watch.</p><p>And then she thinks, “Sorry” (where did that come from?!) – and then there is a … blip? – and then she blinks, and everything has changed.</p><p>Ximena sits by herself in the empty hall and is abruptly terrified.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>Ekaterina hears the moment the breathing stops.</p><p>She’s been here once before. Sitting by a bedside in Krasnoyarsk, her sister’s knitted blanket over her father’s withered legs. No more the jolly tipsy giant who warbled Yeletsky’s aria to his wife, swaying by the firelight with her giggling in his arms, or crooned Träumerei to his daughter after a nightmare, stroking her hair with his broad hand. Now just an old man, at the end of his days, with his daughters weeping silent tears, waiting, listening for each labored breath.</p><p>It’s harder to hear in a hall as large as this. Not as easy as sitting next to a loved one’s bedside, holding his hand, hanging on that exhausted whistling rasp. </p><p>But when a hundred – two hundred? – people cease breathing, a person carefully listening can hear it happen. </p><p>Or perhaps it is a feeling, deep in her bones.-- But however it is, Ekaterina holds her own breath, hardly aware she’s doing it. She doesn’t dare open her eyes. Whatever has happened – a poisonous gas? A biological attack? – she will doubtless succumb in a moment more. She is abruptly, fiercely glad that she heard Träumerei tonight.</p><p>And then another minute, another lifetime, passes, and she does not die. </p><p>And another minute, and the dark shadow at the edge of her shut eyes – some sense beyond any she has ever experienced before – draws away.</p><p>Another minute.</p><p>Another.</p><p>“Excuse me,” someone says, near enough to make her jump, her eyes flying open, startled.</p><p>A young woman is standing there, her hair a flaming peacock beacon in the dim light. </p><p>“Did you feel that?” the peacock says.</p><p>“Where is everyone?” Ekaterina says, her voice coarse and raw.</p><p>The peacock half-darts a look over her shoulder, jerks it back with a full-body flinch. “I think we need to leave. Now.”</p><p>“It’s gone,” Ekaterina says, accepting the peacock’s hand to help her stand. She doesn’t know why she knows that, any more than she knows why she could have sworn she heard a whispered <i>Sorry</i>, the touch of a fey thought upon the wind. “It’s gone.”</p><p>“I’ll feel better when we’re outside,” the peacock says, and gives Ekaterina her elbow up the slanting aisle.</p><p>Mr. Nguyen went home at intermission. The front of the house is deserted. Whoever was supposed to sell memorabilia and lock up after the concert is nowhere to be seen.</p><p>“So,” the peacock says, pushing the door open. “Ever been to a Cage concert like that before?”</p><p>Ekaterina turns her face up into the sputtering rain. The air smells like car exhaust and petrichor. Behind them is the uncanny, the unspeakable. Already it fades from her memory, like a dream upon waking. She can scarcely remember why they fled so precipitously, only knows that something happened from the fear stamped into the marrow of her bones, slower to forget than the malleable fuzz of the brain.</p><p>She hesitates. “No, young lady,” she says, slowly, feeling something intangible slip away. “No, I can’t say that I have.”</p><p>“It’s Ximena,” the peacock says, and smiles at her. She seems like a nice girl, despite the shocking hair. </p><p>“Ekaterina,” Ekaterina says, even though she has at least sixty years on the girl and should insist on Ms. Shafranskaya. </p><p>They find they live only a block apart, and share an Uber home. Their memory shivers between them, and dissipates. They remember the music, and forget the rest.</p><p>Their dreams sometimes half recall.</p>
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  <p>-♪-</p>
</div><p>Subaru is glad that two at least didn’t turn into cats. Not that cats are bad, cats are good. But… </p><p>The humans really do have such a miraculous capacity for rationalization. Since those two didn’t see her – and she can’t fathom how they didn’t! – they’ll forget her. So her self-defense protocol didn’t kick in, and they stayed humans. Nifty.</p><p>She nearly trips over the tuxedo cat and considers taking zir back to the vessel. Zir really is very cute, even if zir can no longer make music beyond limited musical vocalizations. Regretfully, she decides that Sunrisesunset will probably either trip over zir (and a tentacle being tripping is a sight to behold) or turn zir into compost. Sunrisesunset is devoted to zir plants.</p><p>“Goodbye,” she tells the tuxedo cat, who watches her with wide eyes and hisses malevolently.</p><p>Subaru thinks a great deal on her way back to the vessel. She watches the humans and their mayfly lives, and remembers how it felt to have to translate that many of them, all at once. She tastes the silence of that last piece, the Cage one, and hears the music of it again, singing somewhere behind her middle eye. She sees the terror on a wrinkled face, the eyes screwed so tightly shut, the very breath held captive inside the lungs.</p><p>She remembers the melodies of the Shoe Man, and watches the rain fall on the asphalt earth.</p><p>When she gets back to the vessel, Subaru goes to Tacotuesday.</p><p>“I think,” she says, her front tentacles clasped in polite address, “that I have learned enough from this planet.” </p><p>Tacotuesday’s front tentacles move unhurriedly into acceptance. “Then, budling, we shall go.”</p><p>“Just like that?” Subaru says, startled into haste.</p><p>If Tacotuesday were a human, zir would be smiling. “The vessel has been ready for some ten Earth years. But you were not ready. And it was a little time to spare, that you might be content.” Ze cocks zir antennae in question. “Are you content?”</p><p>“Yes,” Subaru says, and feels she will be soon.</p>
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</div><p>Bonded in some way that neither think about too closely, Ekaterina and Ximena become fast friends. They go to concerts together, goodnaturedly squabbling over music and debating the merits of tonality vs. atonality, and cook each other dinner occasionally. Borscht and pozole take turns on Ekaterina’s tiny kitchen table, and Ximena learns how to play chess. Some Sundays, if football and beer gets too loud at her house, she comes to Ekaterina’s, and sprawls out on Ekaterina’s living room floor, her textbooks crowded around her, and Ekaterina puts on a quiet Mozart CD, and smiles. Other days, Ekaterina tries to play Ximena’s music on Pyotr’s violin, and the two of them laugh and laugh, and ignore the thumping of the broom on the floor from the downstairs neighbors, who are not atonal fans.</p><p>If somewhere deep in their brainstem is the memory of terror, it lies dormant.</p><p>And the music of the silence sings, and lives on.</p>
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